Towering cliffs topped with bright lush greenery. Cold clean waves crashing against the stone below, sleek gray clouds swirling through the unbound sky above. A woman dances along the edge, her long hair and scarf whipped wild by the wind. Her bare face is enraptured, eyelids fluttering, nostrils flared, as she draws in breath after [...]

As soon as Etta turned up the overgrown sidewalk to the house-turned-apartment, a redflag notification popped up over the crooked eaves troughs, rotating in the gray sky: two stabbings, one drug arrest, twenty-six noise complaints in the past month. Hey Etta! We found some sketchy stats. Are you sure you want to be here?
“Nope,” Etta [...]

This episode features “Othermother (Annex Excerpt)” written by Rich Larson. Adapted from the novel Annex by Rich Larson. Published in the August 2018 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker.

The text version of this story can be found at:
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/larson_08_18_reprint

The sky was a thick nuclear gray over the parkade where Bo and Violet were scanning the streets for Bo’s othermother. Violet sat on the hood of a battered white Nissan, while Bo watched from the edge with his elbows hooked over the railing.
The othermothers were easy enough to spot, stalking the streets on their [...]

Ostap is putting the finishing touches on a cartoon tardigrade when Alyce calls him. The render is blown up to the size of a sumo, its butcher-paper skin creased and wrinkled around chubby tendril-tipped legs, its eyeless head dominated by a lamprey mouth. He’ll need to make it less terrifying before he sends it to [...]

There was new biomod ivy on the buildings, a ruddy green designed for long winters, but other than that the campus quad looked the same as it did a decade back. Ostap walked the honeycomb paving with his hands in his pockets, head and shoulders above the scurrying students. They were starting to ping him [...]